Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Breaking news, the world is a mess and it seems like it's just getting worse. So how do you find a way to move forward?
Being hopeful acknowledges and embraces that things are difficult and asks, where can we go from here?
Why our future depends on our ability to hope. That's this week on Explain It To Me. New episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
Who gets to be in charge of technology?
Chapter 2: What is lithopanspermia and why is it significant?
If you believe that crypto or AI or any other technology is going to fundamentally change the way that we live our lives, who gets to be in charge turns out to matter a lot.
And this week on The Verge Cast, we're talking about stories about Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and even how the European government changed the way that your web browser looks every day. All that on The Verge Cast, wherever you get podcasts.
I think if you're interested in life, you're always interested in basic questions about life, where it comes from and what it can do.
KT Ramesh studies a lot of things.
I'm a professor of mechanical engineering and material science and earth and planetary sciences. At any given time, I'm not quite sure what I do, but one of those three.
But in the last few years, he's also been exploring questions of life. And specifically, this kind of old idea that has a name that's somehow both technical and salacious at the same time, this thing called lithopanspermia.
So a good way to think about it is to just break that word up into three parts, right? So litho, stone. So this is basically about rocks, pan, everything. Spermio, seeds. So the general idea is the idea of being able to seed life throughout the universe or throughout the solar system through rocks, through basically life being carried in rocks that move around inside the solar system.
A version of this idea goes back as far as the 5th century BC, when a Greek philosopher suggested that maybe life came to Earth as cosmic seeds. Later, in the 1800s, Lord Kelvin proposed that life might have come here on a meteorite. Others put their own spin on this concept.
And while people in more recent times have investigated the ways that life could have developed right here on Earth — no, extraterrestrial sperm required — The lithopanspermia idea has lingered on. It has come up as people talk about space exploration, for example. People have asked, can life travel between planets or moons on rocks?
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Chapter 3: How do researchers test the survival of microbes in space conditions?
They get bombarded by radiation. And we know that you make things really cold, you can keep them from growing. You make them really dry, you can kill them. You put radiation on, you can kill them.
The meteorite might also have to travel through an atmosphere or move at really fast speeds. So the microbes are also probably getting hot for a while. They probably experience a bonk when the meteorite hits a surface somewhere. So all in all, the likelihood of surviving this sort of panspermia gauntlet seems low.
And yet, as KT was digging into the literature, he was also learning that life is pretty hardy. Like, for decades now, researchers have been turning up examples of life here on Earth that can withstand pretty intense conditions.
Organisms that can survive desiccation. Organisms that can survive extreme cold. That can survive radiation. We call them extremophiles. They like extreme conditions.
Sometimes what makes them good at surviving one thing can also help them survive other things. So after he finished his reading, KT thought that maybe, just maybe, there was at least a chance that some microbes could survive the journey through space, despite all the radiation and the cold and the dryness.
But he still wasn't sure that any microbes would even make it to that part of the journey, because he still wasn't sure if any microbes could even survive those initial pressures from the formation of the meteorite.
That question we did not have a good answer to.
Researchers had done a bunch of different experiments to try and work out if microbes could withstand huge pressures, and he respected the researchers who'd done these experiments a lot, but their results didn't give him a clear picture.
So that's how I got into this, is I felt like the data wasn't really there to justify us saying one way or the other. And I figured that maybe I could do this a little more cleanly.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do microbes face when traveling through space?
So we're not paying taxes this year, right? Until the Pentagon passes one damn audit, we shouldn't pay any more taxes.
People don't want to pay taxes anymore because they don't trust the way the government is spending and tracking our money. Americans are fed up with paying taxes.
And I know, I know, but hear me out. Americans are extra fed up with paying taxes lately, according to some Gallup polling and some posting. But are we being short-sighted? I think that it's important to have a government. I think that humans tried anarchy for quite a long time, and it didn't work so well. A lot of people got hit over the head with rocks.
We didn't have a whole lot of economic development. Almost everyone agrees that the United States should have a military to protect it from foreign invasion, that we should have law enforcement, firefighting, schools, etc. Anti-taxers and where this could all be heading on Today Explained, dropping every weekday afternoon.
For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat. I am officially running for president of the United States. It's going to be only America first. America first. Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building
But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from Vox.
The idea of like a post-Trump or not exactly Trump-focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel like so reactive.
You know, I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP. So far, it doesn't among, like, people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But, like, for the first time, you see on a major issue, open opposition from the start of this war. I'm Ested Herndon, and welcome to America Actually.
Suddenly, and against all probability, a sperm whale had been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. Before the break, I told you that KT Ramesh shot bacteria with a gun for an experiment. If I'm being strictly accurate, though, he actually had one of his grad students do this, a mechanical engineer named Lily Zhao.
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